1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to computer software and, more particularly, to software for monitoring web services.
2. Description of Related Art
The “Internet” is a worldwide network of computers. Today, the Internet is made up of more than 65 million computers in more than 100 countries covering commercial, academic and government endeavors. Originally developed for the U.S. military, the Internet became widely used for academic and commercial research. Users had access to unpublished data and journals on a huge variety of subjects. Today, the Internet has become commercialized into a worldwide information highway, providing information on every subject known to humankind.
One means of exploiting the Internet that has gained acceptance over the past several years is through the use of Web services. Web services are Web- (or Internet-) based applications that dynamically interact with other Web applications using open standards, such as, for example, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Such applications typically run behind the scenes with one program communicating with another (i.e., server to server). Examples of two major development platforms that support these standards are Microsoft's NET and Sun's Sun ONE (J2EE).
Service Oriented Architectures are gaining acceptance in the industry and are important to businesses, in part, because Web services enable systems in different companies, and applications built using different technologies, to interoperate with each other more easily than before. Web services provide the foundation for building loosely-coupled integration that leads to increased modularity in a complex distributed computing environment. Loose coupling implies that components should know as little as possible about one another, which allows the components to be changed without impacting the other. Loose coupling generally leads both to modularity and asynchrony (i.e., events that are not synchronized or coordinated in time).
As Web services proliferate, so will the scope of managing all interactions from back-end hardware and software systems through to end-user applications and portals. As more business services are offered by an enterprise, measuring the quality of services in terms of their reliability, availability and performance will become critical. Measuring the response time for services and mapping them to the Service Level Agreement will be important to measure the quality of service.
In traditional component based applications such as, for example, EJB Application Response time, Measurement requires invasive code to be inserted at critical points in the code of each web service to measure response time.
Many enterprises require their deployed web services to have the following characteristics:                Real time response time monitoring        Integration of the response time monitoring into their existing management environment        Independence from a single point of failure from Application Response Management (ARM)        Non-invasive measurement of response time        Single strategy for monitoring of commercial and custom services.        
However, most enterprises do not have a strategy and/or a mechanism to capture service response time and require manual measurement or through network traffic monitoring. For enterprises that are not integrated, tools provide only a fragmented approach without providing a complete solution, since each application or web service requires code to be inserted in order to provide the monitoring services desired by many enterprises. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a application monitoring process that allows an enterprise the ability to seamlessly integrate Custom and COTS Business Web Services; Commercial Web Service Management Platform; Application Response Measurement (ARM) Tools; and Management Console in the Data Center without the need for creating and inserting customized code into each component of the web service offering.